No MacBook: Day 2

March 9th, 2007

Apple Still getting used to life without a MacBook (the hard drive died). My first realization was not having to tote a laptop bag to work, resulting in a light commute with just an iPod in my pocket.

The second realization was that I had my desktop feed reader on there, so I lost all my bookmarks to 30-40 feeds. Blogging while not knowing what’s going on out there sucks. I’ll have to return to Google Reader.

The last observation is that I didn’t have all that much on my harddisk, and in the instance of hard disk failure, I might be better off having everything stored elsewhere or on the net.

So I began writing this post in Google Docs. I’m already a Gmail fan. The other major application I had on the MacBook was Adobe Photoshop, which this year, will debut in a free, online version.

At the end of the day, the only thing that I really need to use my hard disk for are movie and television episodes that I like to watch on my commute home. I’ll keep those archived on my desktop and its back up drive. I should just copying things every once in a while to the MacBook - syncing it as I would an iPod.

Strangely, the flash-based rumors around a “sub-notebook” or “MacBook Slim” now make more sense. How about a Flash based laptop with a version of OS X that did web browsing but all other applications are web based? I remember several years ago there was all this talk about an NC computer. Anyhow, it seems the technology may finally be ready to support something like this. I’d been using my MacBook as a secondary machine, and perhaps the dock and sync model could apply to people in that situation. Kind of like the old PowerBook Duo and an iPod combined.

Tomorrow I’ll take this drive-less MacBook to an Apple Store. But in its absence as it’s being repaired, I’ll be thinking of ways to live a mostly hard disk free life and start using web apps as much as possible.

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